Years ago, not long after ending a marriage, I was having coffee with two women, new acquaintances, when we discovered that we were all divorced. “Yay!” one cried. “Hot Divorcées Club!” Something shrank and recoiled in me. Why must we be hot? Couldn’t we just be divorced? Plus, what in divorce, a thing about as common as marriage, made it worthy of a club? Both being married and being divorced seemed equally empty categories on which to stake an identity. That these two ladies were above average in the physical attractiveness stakes is not the point, nor is that semi-facetious striving for common ground in which new female friendships are forced or forged. The point was we couldn’t just be women who’d been married and now were not.
It’s now clear humanity lacks the luxury of eternity. We know this because evidence has accumulated to show that there are greater, even more encompassing mortalities than our own. We now understand Earth and its life had their origins and, one day, they will be cremated by our ageing Sun. A ‘third death’, then. Beyond that, even the Universe itself has its bounds: it began with a bang, and the consensus view is that, in the distant future, it will likely have its end. Thus, a ‘fourth death’. Multiple grander mortalities, expanding concentrically outward.
We are only just coming to terms with this – this supremacy of finitude. It marks a historic reorganisation of our sense of orientation that may, one day, be judged comparable to that of the Copernican Revolution. Just under 500 years ago, Nicolaus Copernicus initiated a string of discoveries eventually proving our planet is not the centre of a tidy, manageable cosmos. Instead, Earth pirouettes around a mediocre star within an ungraspably vast Universe. It took generations for people to start noticing – and giving names to – what Copernicus had wrought. Similarly, we are only now waking up to the significance of the nested mortalities we live within. With the most seismic revolutions, it takes time for the dust to settle before we can glimpse the landscape transformed.
Perhaps that's down to our culture, which is rooted in tradition, and my parent's generation having to deal with the struggles of being an immigrant in the West. Taking the safer route made sense to ensure success. Their tried and tested attitudes don't only apply to food. They apply to technology, destinations, and careers, too. But food, being the thing that brings us all together, is something we've taken an interesting journey on, guided by the younger members.
This being McBride, it’s the telling that’s as important as the story; in seeking to portray what it’s like to live in a body and a mind, she operates at a frequency most novelists ignore, intuitively able to recognise how something so apparently insignificant as the position of type on a page – indentation, spacing, line breaks – can be pressed into communicating nuances of thought and emotion.